Ukraine war: Russia’s lethal glide bombs hitting Ukraine’s cities

The Vovchansk police chief has been helping to evacuate front-line border villages in the Kharkiv region, where Russian forces have recently been advancing.

Parked up in his police car, he tells us the scale of attacks has increased dramatically.

“Over the past six months, we were hit by glide bombs quite often, maybe five to 10 bombs per week… but this month we’ve had far more than ever,” he said.

Russia is able to stockpile glide bombs in high quantities because they are quite easily produced.

“The explosive part is essentially a conventional freefall iron bomb, of which Russia has hundreds of thousands in storage from the Soviet period,” says Prof Justin Bronk, airpower and military technology specialist at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi).

“They are fitted with pop-out wings which, after the bomb is dropped, will flick out to allow it to glide much longer distances.”

Their attached satellite guidance system allows targeting of a stationary position with relatively high accuracy.

According to Prof Bronk, the mechanism of the bombs gives the Russians much of the functionality of a multi-million dollar missile, but for a fraction of the cost.

He says that glide kits – which are mass-produced and pretty mechanically simple – are added to Soviet bombs, of which the Russians have a plentiful supply – meaning the cost per weapon can be “somewhere in the region of $20,000 to $30,000 (£15,700-£23,600)”.

The concept is not new. The Germans deployed the Fritz-X during World War Two. In the 1990s the US military developed the Joint Attack Direct Munition, or JDAM, which added steerable tail fins and GPS guidance to traditional free-fall bombs. They have been used extensively since, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.